Alternate history: Switch a generation earlier

[Pemalite]

curl-6 said:

Pemalite said:

It would actually be pretty hard to tell them apart all things considered.

nVidia didn't really start to get ahead of other GPU manufacturers in the ARM SOC space until Kepler happened which brought forth a myriad of efficiency optimizations to the core architecture on top of a massive increase in functional units.
Maxwell took that and refined it to the 10th degree.

Out of curiosity, with a Tegra 3 would it be viable for a 2011 Switch to get "impossible ports" of PS3/360 titles, similar to how the historical Switch got ports of PS4/XBO titles? I mean, of course it would vary by game, COD was ported to the Wii after all, but just how capable would it be in this regard?

Architecturally the Tegra 3's graphics processor is feature-equivalent to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Full Pixel and Vertex shader support.

It probably closely resembles a Geforce 6800XT from a functional unit perspective and capability standpoint... But with obviously a big hit to fillrate due to the single channel LPDDR3 interface.
..But nVidia did bring forth things like a pixel cache and z-culling which didn't happen on the desktop until Fermi and G80 which alleviates some of that bandwidth deficit.

So all in all, I would say "yes" it would get "impossible ports" of Xbox 360/Playstation 3 titles in the same way that the Switch gets ports of Xbox One/Playstation 4 titles.

And the big reason for that is actually the hardware feature sets... If you don't need to rewrite things like your shader code to shoe-horn it into a fixed function rendering pipeline, then it is easier for developers to make some concessions to get it to run on other platforms relatively easily.

Basically I would expect 360P-480P, 30fps, Xbox 360 titles, but with reduced shadowing and texturing detail... Maybe a few other concessions, but that's the ballpark generally, just like the Vita.

In saying that... I am glad we gamers got the 3DS as that itself was a very unique experience not found elsewhere.